Jessica Collado

On April 1, when I closed up the Hesburgh Center several hours after the last Peace Conference participant had departed, my fellow organizers asked, “So, how do you think it went?” As a mathematics major, my first impulse was to consider the numbers.

The conference has been organized every spring since 1993 by Notre Dame undergraduates. The 2005 event had 200 participants, including nearly 60 vegetarians. There were 50 presenters (mostly undergraduate and graduate students, but also faculty and South Bend community members). More than 30 colleges and universities were represented. A planning committee of 15 spent eight months preparing for exactly 24 hours of intense listening and discussion. Two hundred T-shirts and 53 pizzas later, I was willing to guess that the conference was a success. But not just because of the numbers.

The success of the conference is most apparent in the participants’ discovery of shared experience, ambitions and vision, despite their different personal foundations and backgrounds. John Paul Lederach set the stage for such discussion during his keynote address, “The Moral Imagination.” The Kroc Institute professor of international peacebuilding said: “We circle in on the truth through stories.”

We titled the conference “Crossing Boundaries in the Name of Peace” and set out to make it as interdisciplinary, inter-religious, nonpartisan, multi-aged and multicultural as possible. We sought out and generated creative and varied proposals for presentations. Most speakers encouraged the sharing of stories. The main panel at midday was titled “Working Relationships between the Military and NGOs in the Crisis Zone.” It featured Major Gary Masapollo of the military science department and research fellow David Cortright of the Kroc Institute. The discussion highlighted the crossing of boundaries between two fields of study that might seem inevitably at odds with each other.

Some students presented papers on both the liberal arts approaches to peace and the religious aspects of peace. Another group of presenters looked at conflict in Haiti through the lenses of biology, business, and engineering. Also on the agenda: a girls’ baile folclorico dance performance, a workshop on conflict transformation, the Take Ten youth non-violence awards presentation, and a panel discussion about ways to decrease youth violence in South Bend area. The final speaker, peace activist Renata Rendon, left many in the audience on the verge of tears with a moving story of her work in Colombia.

During the conference, two participants from South Africa were by chance assigned to room together. Afterward, one of them told me that she and her roommate would probably stay in touch for the rest of their lives after connecting here in Indiana. Such lasting relationships are, I think, another good way to calculate the success of Peace Conference 2005.

Jess Collado, a member of the Notre Dame Class of ’06, is majoring in both applied mathematics and peace studies.

Top of Page

Home > Publications > Peace Colloquy > Issue 8, Summer 2005 > Relationships, numbers add up to conference success